Piraters Pay Up in Light of Team Meat Interview

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Developer honesty leads to gamers coming clean.

By Colin Campbell

A few weeks ago the guys at Team Meat spoke to IGN about piracy, and why they believe it can help a game reach new audiences. In the aftermath of that feature, a bunch of gamers who had played copied versions of games like Team Meat's Super Meat Boy contacted the guys directly to say they decided to buy legitimate copies. We asked Edmund McMillen for more information.

"When you show the public respect, they give you that respect back."

IGN: Following the IGN article, you guys got a lot of positive feedback, including emails from people who'd played pirated copies saying they had decided to buy a legitimate copy. Tell us about that.

McMillen: Following the article we did get a great deal of positive response from the public and many emails "confessing their piracy sins" and explaining how they went out and purchased the game on Steam after playing or shortly after reading the article. We were actually taken a back by the number of positive comments we got about speaking honestly on this issue and I think the response goes hand in hand with the idea that people don't like being lied to or talked down to. When you show the public respect, they give you that respect back.

"They went out and purchased the game on Steam after playing or shortly after reading the article."

IGN: Did they buy the game out of guilt? Or duty? or respect? Can these emotions be relevant when we're talking about a big corporation making games, rather than a couple of likable guys?

McMillen: Some did buy the game out of guilt, others out of duty or respect. Some just paid for the game because of the article period. But I honestly don't think the reasons behind it matter much. The fact of the matter is that piracy is popular because it's cheap. But it's easy to do with games and very risky when it comes to viruses. So the key factor here is making it easier for people to pay and justify this payment in their minds. Either way these type of people are a very small percentage of those who pirate.

There will always be a large number of people who will pirate something, the more popular the thing is the more it will be pirated. It's safe to assume a great majority of these people would never have purchased this product, a smaller group might have purchased but didn't have the money to do so, and an even smaller group that had the ability to buy the product but didn't because it was simply easier to pirate than buy it.

I think if you look at this logically, the vast majority of people who pirate stuff but never really expect to buy anything can be viewed as a group that can be swayed to "advertise" your product if they like it. What I mean is, I firmly believe that when this group of people pirates something, and they love it, they will go out of their way to talk about how much they do and in turn get other people to buy it. I've witnessed this countless times by many people including myself, and this is why I strongly believe piracy can be very good for some games.

As far as large corporations go, I think they need to look at things the same way, a vast majority of these people weren't ever going to give you their money, and if you want that smaller percentage to buy your products it's time to get realistic about the pricing on your digital games.. There's no damn overhead for digital games... let's get realistic here, there's no reason to spend 60 bucks on a digital game when it's 65 bucks in store.

"Trying to fine or put people in jail for piracy isn't at all an effective solution."

IGN: You say you "don't care" if people pirate your games. You say that if a good game gets pirated a lot, it will sell more copies through consumer sampling. If piracy aids game sales, and if game sales are your goal, aren't you really saying you want people to pirate your game?

McMillen: We don't care if people pirate our games because we are realistic and understanding of how things work right now. Of course we don't want everyone to pirate everything we make, that makes no sense, but we aren't going to be the people who scream "Piracy is bad, don't do it" and assume it's going to stop anyone.

People pirate things that are digital because it's easy. There are many effective ways to fix this problem, but crazy DRM and trying to fine or put people in jail for piracy isn't at all an effective solution.

Things like lowering the price of digital games, Steam sales, Humble Bundle, online achievements and other exclusive Steam related content are huge factors in getting someone who pirated something to purchase it legitimately or not pirate it at all. Places like Steam, Netflix and Hulu are fighting piracy in extremely realistic ways.

Times have changed, piracy isn't shop lifting and shouldn't be treated as such. This is a digital age and we are just now learning how things work, I personally believe with time the vast majority of piracy issues will be fixed, not by fighting it but by innovating around it like the companies I've mentioned.

It's like when you teach your kid about safe sex, you don't say "Don't ever have sex or you'll die and go to hell". That's not effective way. Kids are going to have sex and people are going to pirate sh&t, telling them not to do it isn't going to fix anything, it's simply time people understood that this stuff is happening and it's not going to away by telling people to stop and/or not talking about it.